Monday, November 30, 2015

Ugly, Inside and Out: Pictures of Christina Aguilera Without Makeup, and Her Improvements on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”

 

There aren’t many pictures floating around of the unpainted Aguilera; even many pictures whose publishers claim are makeup-free depict the performer wearing gobs of war paint. And of course, there is the ubiquitous dried-out, bleached mop, tweezed eyebrows, and boob jobs.
 

By Nicholas Stix

I don’t make a habit of re-posting unflattering pictures of performers. A few years ago, I saw a presentation of female porno performers without their war paint, and the effect was quite lacking in eroticism. However, the more I look into female contemporary “celebrities,” the more I see that they are no better. Several years ago, I saw a picture of a makeup-free Jennifer Lopez, who was a Plain Jane, even after getting a nose-job. Just imagine what she’d looked like, to begin with.

 

Daily Mail: “Natural beauty: Christina Aguilera gave a rare glimpse of her natural beauty as she went…”
 

I used to teach at CUNY’s Hispanic-dominated Bronx Community and Hostos Community colleges, where the majority of the students were Dominican, and no one could afford nose, boob, or butt jobs, and yet the average coed was better looking than Lopez was, after she’d gotten her nose job, and more than a few girls there were knockouts. I’ll never for the life of me understand why pretty and even stunning girls (I’ve seen this among white girls, too) will idolize as “beautiful” the overpaid creations of makeup experts.
 

Allegedly without makeup
 

I’ve known for app. 20 years that Christina Aguilera is a tramp who wears more makeup than a 10th Avenue streetwalker, but who has worse manners than your average working girl. The recording industry clearly promotes the slut style (think the unfortunately named Charlotte Church), with feminists’ enthusiastic support.

For years, when I ran into men who had teenaged daughters, I would joke to them, “What, do you go around with them handcuffed to one hand, with a shotgun in the other”? Although I sympathized with such men, I never feared what it would be like raising a daughter. Just as my late mother-in-law, may she rest in peace, needed no help from my late father-in-law disciplining their seven daughters, I would never have needed to get involved in beating our daughters, if we’d had any. The Boss is so old school, that if any daughter of ours had ever dared to look, act, or talk slutty, she would have given the girl a good thrashing, handed her the phone, and said, “Here, call child welfare!” (What if the girl had done the unthinkable, and dropped a dime on us, you ask? She would never have darkened our doorway again. But it wouldn’t have happened.)

I was reminded of Christina Aguilera when I re-posted Frank Sinatra’s great performance of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” When I searched for Ralph Blane’s lyrics, Google claimed that they had been written by Aguilera, who had cut a Christmas album, for which she not only dressed like a trollope (yeah, I know, that’s how one dresses for a Christmas album cover), but “improvilated” the words!
 

 

Google: Did You know that Christina Aguilera wrote, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”?
 

Lyrics

Oh yeah, mmm
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
From now on your troubles will be out of sight, yeah
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the Yuletide gay
From now on your troubles will be miles away, oh
Here we are as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore, ah
Faithful friends who are dear to us
They gather near to us once more, ooh
Through the years we all will be together and
If the fates allow
Hang a shining star upon the highest bow, oh yeah, oh
And have yourself a merry little Christmas now, oh, oh
Faithful friends who are dear to us
They gather near to us once more, oh, oh
Through the years we all will be together and
If the fates allow, oh yeah
But 'til then we'll have to muddle through somehow, oh yeah, oh, oh
And have yourself a merry little Christmas now, ooh yeah, oh, ooh
 

Mmm, yeah, oh.

 

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Frank Sinatra Sings Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane's Holiday Classic, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
 

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
(Written for Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis, 1944)
Music by Hugh Martin
Words by Ralph Blane

Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
Let your heart be light,
From now on,
Our troubles will be out of sight.

Have yourself
A merry little Christmas,
Choir: Merry little Christmas,
Make the Yuletide gay,
Choir: Make the Yuletide gay,
From now on,
Our troubles will be miles away.

Here we are,
As in olden days,
Happy golden days
Of yore.

Faithful friends,
Who are dear to us,
Gather near to us,
Once more.

Through the years,
We all will be
Together,
If the fates allow.

Hang a shining star
Upon the highest bough,
And have yourself
A merry little Christmas now.
 

Choir:

Here we are,
As in olden days,
Happy golden days
Of yore.

Faithful friends who are
Dear to us,
Gather near to us,
Once more.

Sinatra: Through the years
We all will be
Together,
If the fates allow.

Hang a shining star
Upon the highest bough,
And have yourself
A merry little Christmas now.
 

Male choir singer, softly:

Merry Christmas,
Merry Christmas.
 


 

Posted on December 23, 2008 by mjm1799.

From: The Sinatra Christmas Album

Track: 6

Chorus and Orchestra Conducted By: Gordon Jenkins

Year: 1957

Merry Christmas Everyone!!!!

- MJM1799 -
 

“Domestic Terrorism” in New Orleans: Black Man Shoots 17 on Playground, Where Hundreds were Present

 

NOPD mug shot of Joseph Allen, 32. “Joseph Allen, 32, is accused of firing into a crowd of several hundred people at Bunny Friend Park in New Orleans.”
 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

Suspect Arrested in New Orleans Playground Shooting That Wounded 17
By Tim Stelloh
Nov 29 2015, 3:40 p.m. ET
NBC News

16 People Injured in New Orleans Playground Shootings 0:32

[Warning: If you hit the link to this article, you’ll get a video. Said video will waste app. 90 seconds of your time. Once you get it going, you will get a very loud, 30-second commercial. Then you will get nothing. If you jigger with the video, you will eventually get someone’s 32-second cellphone video of people and vehicles standing around at the crime scene, with no news. Then nothing. The “video” was nothing but a con job by NBC News to get you to watch their lousy commercial. The only “positive” is that unlike other media organizations, NBC News did not rig this particular page to repeatedly re-play the same commercial, without ever playing the news video, and then to change the page altogether to their main page, in order to gull you into hitting the back button, so you can be forced into watching the stupid commercial a few more times, without ever getting the news report. On the rare occasion that you do get the news report, it typically proves to match, word for word, the written report on the Web page. Several outlets now do this, but the only name that comes to mind, offhand, is the worst offender, Gannett’s USAToday.]
 

A suspect was arrested Saturday in connection with a New Orleans playground shootout last week that left 17 people injured, including 11 teenagers and children, police said.

The man, Joseph Allen, 32, turned himself in after police released a photo and announced that he would be charged with 17 counts of first-degree attempted murder, NBC affiliate WDSU reported.

Allen is accused of firing into a crowd of several hundred people who had gathered early on the evening of Sunday, Nov. 22, at Bunny Friend Park, in New Orleans' 9th Ward, for the filming of a music video.

A chaotic scene followed, with paramedics tending to the wounded at the park and rushing others to local hospitals. Witnesses recalled hearing too many gunshots to count.
During a news conference last week, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu described the shooting as "akin to domestic terrorism."

Police, who described the shooting as potentially gang-related and said that two "groups of individuals" opened fire on each other, are still seeking additional suspects.

On Twitter, the New Orleans Police Department said that after Allen's arrest, he declined to provide police with a statement. It was unclear Sunday if he had a lawyer.

News Alert! Years-Long Investigative Research Has Turned Up a Positive Fact About John McCain

 

The Washington, D.C. statue of Mao Tse-Tung, er, Martin Luther King Jr.
 

Excerpted by Nicholas Stix

“There was a time when principled conservatives, such as Sen. Jesse Helms, James J. Kilpatrick, Murray Rothbard, Paul Gottfried, and others recognized King for the dubious and possibly dangerous symbol he was. Even John McCain voted against making Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday and originally stood by Arizona Gov. Evan Mecham’s decision to cancel the MLK holiday in Arizona.”

“That Martin Luther King Memorial: ‘Free at Last’—or Flash Mobs?” by Cooper Sterling, VDARE, August 29, 2011.]
McCain eventually flip-flopped, but at least he didn’t immediately jump on the MLK Express. However, in the McCain spirit of seizing moral defeat from the jaws of victory, he has apologized for once being right, and his enemies have cut him no slack, neither for his “flip,” nor his “flop.”

Good News! More Chaos, Big Europe-Style: Jean-Claude Juncker is Talking Dominoes; Schengen Free-Travel Zone is Ready to Fall, and in Turn Knock Over the Euro, Which Will Knock Over … Could the Restoration of Europe Beckon?

 

Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker is President of the European Commission
 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

I thank reader-researcher RC for this article.
 

Collapse of comatose Schengen will wreck euro admits Jean-Claude Juncker

Jean-Claude Juncker issues bleakest assessment yet of state of Schengen free-travel zone
By Matthew Holehouse, Brussels
3:59PM GMT 25 Nov 2015
The Telegraph

The Schengen zone is “partially comatose”, Jean-Claude Juncker conceded on Wednesday, as he warned that its collapse would take down the eurozone.

The single currency cannot survive if the free movement of people granted by the passport-free travel zone ends, the president of the European Commission said, in the starkest warning yet.

Mr Juncker could only watch this summer after state after state reintroduced border controls in a desperate attempt to halt the influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants. The Paris terrorist attacks led France to announce indefinite border checks.

"We have to safeguard the spirit behind Schengen,” Mr Juncker told the European Parliament. “Yes, the Schengen system is partially comatose.”

“But those who believe in Europe, its values, its principles and its freedoms, must try to breathe new life into the spirit behind Schengen.

[What “values,” “principles,” and “freedoms”? Bureaucratic totalitarianism? Freedom for Islamization? And to borrow from UKIP, freedom for jihadis?]

"If the spirit leaves our hearts, we will lose more than Schengen. A single currency does not exist if Schengen fails. It is not a neutral concept. It is not banal. [Oh, yes it is!] It is one of the pillars of the construction of Europe." [Europe existed for millennia before the introduction of the Euro. Juncker is confusing the destruction of Europe, with its “construction.”]

Under the French crackdown, passport checks are being carried out on cross-border trains and at checkpoints on certain road crossings.

At least three of the Paris attackers are believed to have used the migrant trail to enter Europe undetected, leading to accusations from Ukip that the [sic] Schengen amounted to the “free movement of kalashnikovs, terrorists and jihadists”.

"Please don't get things mixed up. We should not exploit in an absurd manner these tragic events," said Mr Juncker, whose office had resisted French demands for universal security checks on migrants and EU passport holders.

Fabrice Leggeri, the head of Frontex, the EU agency charged with protecting the bloc’s external borders, admitted that it would take more than a year for his body to be granted access to the security databases that would allow it to detect terrorists.

He blamed MEPs for denying Frontex access to such databases in the past.

Norway, which is not in the EU but sits within Schengen, became the latest to reintroduce border checks on Wednesday to halt the flow from neighbouring Sweden, which is expected to receive an extra 350,000 people by the end of next year.

“The large number of asylum seekers and migrants is creating big challenges for us,” said Siv Jensen, the finance minister, in a statement.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, issued an ultimatum on Wednesday to EU leaders to embrace Mr Juncker’s troubled migrant relocation scheme or see the collapse of free movement. [Is that a threat, or a promise?]

 

Photographers take pictures as European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (C) talks with Members of the European Parliament
 

Mrs Merkel drove the policy to relocate 160,000 people around the EU against the heads of eastern European states. Two months on, the project has flopped. Member states have offered just 3,000 places and 159 people have been moved.

"A distribution of refugees according to economic strength and other conditions, and the readiness for a permanent distribution mechanism, will determine whether the Schengen area will hold in the long term," she said.

FAQ


The Schengen Agreement




Photo credit: Alamy

What is it?


An agreement, signed in 1985 in the town of Schengen in Luxembourg, to remove border checks within Europe. It means anyone, regardless of nationality, can move freely between member states without showing a passport or visa


Who is a member?


Not the UK. But most EU states are in, as are Switzerland, Iceland and Norway. In total, 26 countries comprising 400 million people


Why is it under strain?


Terrorists and mass migration. Police checks have been brought in on the Italian border at the request of Bavaria, amid a wave of non-EU migrants attempting to reach Germany. Angela Merkel warns the system will be pulled apart unless countries share asylum seekers. And Belgium wants more ID checks on trains in the wake of the Thalys train terrorist attack


Are checks legal?


Police are allowed to make targeted 'security' checks on the border, and states can impose border controls in an emergency or for major events for up to 30 days. But permanent, systematic checks on passports are forbidden


What does the European Union say?


Jean Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, says the system is non-negotiable, irreversible, and the EU's greatest achievement


What do Eurosceptics say?


"Schengen has now hit the buffers of the real world and is falling apart," says Nigel [N.S.: The passage ended abruptly, due to bad editing, probably deliberately so. The writer was likely referring to UKIP leader Nigel Farage.]

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Hear a Young Frank Sinatra Sing Tom Adair & Matt Dennis’ “Everything Happens to Me,” with the Tommy Dorsey Organization (1940s)

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
 

Track Title: Everything Happens to Me


Artist: Frank Sinatra
Lyrics by: Tom Adair
Music by: Matt Dennis
From the Album: Stardust: Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra(A)

Black cats creep across my path until I'm almost mad
I must have roused the Devil's wrath 'cause all my luck is bad
I make a date for golf and can bet your life it rains
I try to give a party but the guy upstairs complains
I guess I'll go thru life just catchin' colds and missin' trains
Everything happens to me

I never miss a thing, I've had the measles and the mumps
And every time I play an ace, my partner always trumps
I guess I'm just a fool who never looks before he jumps
Everything happens to me

At first my heart thought you could break this jinx for me
That love would turn the trick to end despair
But now I just can't fool this head that thinks for me
So I've mortgaged all my castles in the air

I've telegraphed and phoned, sent an Air Mail Special, too
You answer was "Goodbye", there was even postage due
I fell in love just once and then it had to be with you
Everything happens to me

I've never drawn a sweepstake or a bank night at a show
I thought perhaps this time I'd won but Lady Luck said "No"
And though it breaks my heart I'm not surprised to see you go
Everything happens to me

Everything happens to me
 


 

Transcribed by Ron Hontz
Ronhontz@att.net

From material submitted by
Contributed by Larry Henares of the Philippines
larryh@mydestiny.net

http://www.thepeaches.com/music/

In American Idiocracy, the Victim/Heroes are Criminals Whose Highest Expression is in Their Middle Fingers

 

 

By Nicholas Stix
Revised and expanded on Sunday, November 29, 2015, at 4:46 a.m.

I grant you, on rare occasion, telling someone “F—k you” can be eloquent. However, America is being inundated by people who think it’s cool and eloquent to curse all time.

My chief of research and I recently viewed Mike Judge’s movie, Idiocracy, set 500 years in the future, in which people routinely greet each other by giving each other the finger. They also express intellectual disagreement by giving each other the finger, or uttering the most common Anglo-Saxonism.

Judge tried to triangulate, by having most of the imbeciles played by white actors, but it was clearly a racial satire, and his triangulation didn’t help. Rupert Murdoch's Fox greenlighted the project, but then got cold feet, and passively killed it, by refusing to give it wide distribution.
 


How Moslems and Their Supporters Lie About the Geneva Conventions, in Order to Aid and Abet Terrorists

 

[Previously, on this theme, at WEJB/NSU:

“After Guantanamo: The War Over the Geneva Convention”; and

“Part II: After Guantanamo: The War Over the Geneva Convention.”]
 

Do Terrorists Have Rights?

By Nicholas Stix
First published November 11, 2003
Toogood Reports/Front Page Magazine/A Different Drummer

Is the U.S. a terrorist state? Are al Qaeda fighters the good guys? That's what you might think, to read the New York Times editorial page, and some of the humanitarian bureaucrat-activists who, though largely unknown to the general public, have tremendous clout with the Times.

An October 16 New York Times editorial (“The American Prison Camp”) attacked the Bush Administration for maintaining its detainee camp for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Citing criticism of the Bush Administration by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the editorial claimed that Administration justifications for the camp “miss the point,” are “unpersuasive,” and have “no foundation in the Geneva Conventions,” and demanded, in the name of “justice,” that unlawful combatants (in this case, terrorists) be granted civil rights that the U.S. in previous wars had not granted even to lawful combatants. Traditionally, unlawful combatants have been considered not soldiers, but criminals, spies or saboteurs, and executed or imprisoned for lengthy sentences.

Note that the Red Cross—which also calls itself “the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement”—has barred groups at post-911 Red Cross events in the U.S. from singing “God Bless America,” lest they offend Muslims; has barred the Israeli Magen David ambulance service (which has an unblemished record of aiding the wounded, regardless of religion or politics, and having never aided terrorists) from joining; and has let its ambulances repeatedly be used by Palestinian terrorists in Israel—some of whom proved to be Palestine Red Crescent Society employees in good standing!—for the transportation of homicide bombers and weapons under humanitarian cover. And as scholar Jeremy Rabkin has noted, an official at the Red Cross/Red Crescent’s Geneva headquarters circulated the heinous blood libel, that claimed that Israel had orchestrated the 911 attacks.

As the example of the Red Cross/Red Crescent shows, humanitarianism is a sometime thing. And yet, as the murderous, October 27 attack on the Red Cross/Red Crescent’s Baghdad headquarters showed, even supporting terrorists fails to protect an organization from their wrath.

Like the Red Cross/Red Crescent, the U.N., Doctors Without Borders, and other “humanitarian,” “non-governmental” organizations are also hostile to America’s right to self-defense.

The New York Times insists that “The justifications offered by the administration are equally unpersuasive. The argument that the detainees are not prisoners of war because they are not uniformed members of a regular armed force has no foundation in the Geneva Conventions.”

That, simply, is a lie. On no less than five points, does the 1949 Geneva Convention explicitly support the Bush Administration’s position that the Guantanamo detainees are unlawful combatants, and thus not protected as prisoners of war, because:

1. They are not fighting for a Contracting Party to the Convention;
2. They are not “commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates”;
3. They wear no uniforms or the equivalent (“a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance”), identifying them as combatants;
4. They fail the test of “carrying arms openly”; and
5. They fail the test “of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.”

The Geneva Conventions implicitly recognize principles of reciprocity, the right of national self-defense, and enlightened, national self-interest; the New York Times does not – at least, not in the case of the U.S. And yet, since the Geneva Conventions have for many liberals a sacrosanct status, instead of saying that he held them in contempt, the Times editorialist chose to lie about what the Conventions say.

The Times was echoing a strategy which was established, after 911, by influential humanitarian organizations, including the Red Cross/Red Crescent and the Open Society Institute (OSI).

(OSI was founded and is funded by billionaire socialist George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish financier, who thinks that worldwide anti-Semitism is caused by … Jews! OSI’s president, Aryeh Neier, was the executive director of the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, respectively. During his time at the ACLU, Neier helped subvert the nation’s premier civil liberties group, transforming it into an anti-civil liberties, civil rights organization. Thus it is that the ACLU, an organization that in the past routinely sued to defend people’s First Amendment right to freedom of religion, now routinely sues to suppress people’s freedom of religion, under the complaint that others’ free exercise of religion “offends” the ACLU’s clients. A judiciary that recognizes a plaintiff’s—or certain plaintiffs’—right to be offended cannot also recognize civil liberties, because the right to take offense will not tolerate civil liberties. The right to take offense implies an unlimited prerogative on the part of certain plaintiffs to circumscribe other parties’ speech and action.)

As Aryeh Neier expressed them in a September, 2002 article, “Did the Era of Rights End on September 11?,” in Crimes of War magazine, his foreign policy ideas amount to the belief that ‘International law is a suicide pact – at least, for America.’ Based on a highly partisan notion of “rights,” which accrue to political allies, but are denied to political enemies, Neier advocates for the rhetorical fiction of international “humanitarian law,” which he insists is unilaterally binding on all nations. But in the case of the War on Terror, for Neier, such unilateral law is binding only on the U.S. That’s unilateralism, leftwing style.

Conversely, in the article, “After Guantanamo: The War Over the Geneva Convention,” in the Summer, 2002 issue of The Public Interest, Jeremy Rabkin, a Cornell University professor of international law, emphasized that the Geneva Convention is a contract or treaty, regulating conduct only between the parties to it. It is not a transcendent or universally binding law.
A treaty, as The Federalist (No. 64) explained in 1788, “is only another name for a bargain.” At the heart of the Geneva Conventions is this bargain: fight according to these professional rules and we will treat you with professional respect.

The main rules for defining combatant status go back to The Hague Convention of 1899. They are not based on ancient ideas of rank and courtesy. Rather, the rules were drawn up at conferences at which military officers were not merely present as observers, but constantly at the elbow of the diplomats and lawyers as full participants for what they could provide by way of practical advice. The rules thus rest pre-eminently on practical considerations.
Aryeh Neier cited Red Cross/Red Crescent criticisms of the Bush Administration, and the organization’s dubious interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, as part of his own misrepresentation of the Conventions.

(Neier also misrepresented Rabkin’s views, maintaining that Rabkin had argued that under the principle of reciprocity, one Contracting Party to the Conventions may breach the Conventions, while justifiably engaging in savage reprisals against the uniformed soldiers and civilians alike of an enemy Contracting Party to the Conventions, in response to the enemy’s breaches of the Conventions. Since Rabkin had explicitly condemned such reprisals, this was yet another lie on the part of Aryeh Neier, who would seem to lack any capacity for honest debate. It is Neier’s propagandistic modus operandi, apparently, to misrepresent the views of any document or thinker with whom he disagrees.)

Whereas under the laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions, terrorists have traditionally been treated as criminals, the Red Cross/Red Crescent and OSI’s insistence on treating terrorists as lawful combatants, legitimizes terrorism, and turns the laws of war upside down.

Although the “humanitarians” clearly do not confront this consequence, their way of thinking would ultimately also destroy the moral foundations of medical neutrality. Red Cross/Red Crescent units would have to be looked upon as mixed-use military units, which engage both in killing and saving lives.

(Due to repeated abuses of medical neutrality by the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Israeli soldiers have already been forced to take such a position. The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has refused to accept responsibility for, or at least apologize for terrorist acts committed by its personnel using its vehicles, or take steps to protect against the abuse of its ambulances as terrorist delivery vehicles. Instead, the PRCS has taken the rhetorical offensive, using propaganda identical to that of Yassir Arafat, in seeking to organize “the World Community and Governments” to intervene on its behalf against Israel, and prosecute Israeli soldiers as “war criminals.”

The PRCS is a terrorist organization. That it also engages in humanitarian work is beside the point; Hamas also engages in humanitarian work on behalf of Arab Muslims, when it is not murdering Jews. The PRCS beckons as the future face of humanitarianism.)

Working under a cloak of feigned neutrality, “humanitarians”—aided and abetted by the New York Times—seek to disarm the U.S. in the War on Terror. They would usurp control from the U.S. over such matters as the determination of who is a lawful combatant, and grant civil rights—which rightfully attach only to citizens—to foreign terrorists. The humanitarian groups and the Times seek to give terrorists a platform in the American judicial system, politicize every aspect of the War on Terror, and bury the federal courts under an avalanche of terrorism cases.

As Jeremy Rabkin observed, “This episode should warn the wise that ambitious new versions of international law are likely to become a continuing source of mischief in the world, and much trouble to the United States.”

“A Crime to Remember”: Why is Compassion for the Victims of Interracial Crime Always a One-Way Street?

 
Previously, on this subject:

[“Whites Always Grieve for the Rare Black Victims of White Violence, but as Vester Flanagan’s Racist Atrocity Shows, for the Umpteenth Time, All but a Microscopic Number of Blacks are Devoid of Such Compassion and Moral Outrage for the White Victims of Constant Black Racist Murders.”]
 

By David in TN

On this subject, you might want to see an episode from this season's ID Channel show, “A Crime to Remember.” Titled, “Lock Up Your Daughters,” it concerns a (white) serial killer of young girls in Gaffney, South Carolina in 1968.

Three white girls were abducted and killed, then a black girl. The murder of the latter “brought the town together.” The fictional narrator of this episode is a black woman who says, “I admit I didn't care too much when the first three girls killed were white.”

Of course, she didn't. No irony was intended by the show's producers.

N.S.: This episode ran again at 8 pm ET on Thursday, November 19, and will, at some point, be re-run yet again.

Difference in SAT Scores Between Well-to-Do Blacks and Dirt-Poor Whites: 0.0% (Chart)

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix


Join Frank Sinatra, Jule Styne, Sammy Cahn and Axel Stordahl for a Special Performance of “Time After Time”

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
 

Album Title: The Columbia Years, 1943-1952, Vol. 5
Primary Artist: Frank Sinatra
Arranger: Axel Stordahl


Music by: Jule Styne
Lyrics by: Sammy Cahn
From the Album: The Voice (A)

From the Show: It Happened In Brooklyn 1947 (M)

Time After Time

Time after time,
I tell myself that I'm,
So lucky to be
Loving you.

So lucky to be,
The one you run to see,
In the evening,
When the day is through.

I only know what I know,
The passing years will show,
You've kept my love
So young, so new.

And time after time,
You'll hear me say that I'm,
So lucky to be
Loving you.

I only know what I know,
The passing years will show,
You've kept my love so young, so new,
And time after time, you'll hear me say that I'm
So lucky to be loving you.
 

Transcribed by Ron Hontz
Ronhontz@att.net


From material submitted by Larry Henares of the Philippines
larryh@mydestiny.net

http://www.thepeaches.com/music/
 


 

Published on April 5, 2014 by Henry Miller.

Friday, November 27, 2015

Hear Frank Sinatra Sing “It Had to be You,” with the Full Lyrics, Including the Intro!

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

 

[Previously, at WEJB/NSU:

Mark Steyn on “It Had to be You” (Steyn on Sinatra).]
 

It Had to be You
Music by Isham Jones
Lyrics by Gus Kahn

Why do I do just as you say?
Why must I just give you your way?
Why do I sigh?
Why do I try to forget?

It must have been that
Something lovers call fate,
Kept me saying,
“I had to wait.”

I saw them all
Just couldn't fall,
‘Til we met.

It had to be you,
It had to be you,
I've wandered around,
Finally found somebody who.

Could make me be true,
Could make me be blue,
And, even be glad just to be sad
Thinkin' of you.

Some others I've seen,
Might never be mean,
Might never be cross,
Or, try to be boss,
But, they wouldn't do.

For nobody else
Gave me a thrill,
With all your faults,
I love you still.

It had to be you,
Wonderful you,
It had to be you.

‘Cause nobody else gave me a thrill
With all your faults, I love you still now
And it had to be you, it just had to be you
It had to be you.
 


 

Published on July 7, 2015 by Frank Sinatra Greatest Hits.





Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
 



 

Steyn, Sinatra, and “New York, New York” (the Wrong Song)

 

 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
 

"Theme from New York, New York"
Steyn's Song of the Week
By Mark Steyn
Steyn Online

On the first of our Sinatra Century audio specials, Frank's longtime pianist and musical director Vincent Falcone talks about the many years he spent working with the singer mostly on stage but also in the studio. For example, on September 19th 1979 in Los Angeles, it fell to Vinnie Falcone to conduct what would become one of the biggest Sinatra recordings of all time:

Start spreading the news
I'm leaving today
I want to be a part of it...

As I say on the podcast, it's one of the most famous records on the planet. I mention that it turns up as a musical joke en passant during a car chase in the new Bond movie, Spectre. Just the opening bars - that famous John Kander vamp that Vincent Falcone conducts - and that's all it needs, because few records have such an instantly recognizable intro. Everyone in the movie theater got the joke, as I'm sure they did almost everywhere the film's been shown.

It was written by two men: One was John Kander, born in 1927 in Kansas City, Missouri, and educated at Oberlin. I don't know whether he spread the news on the day of his leaving, but he wanted to be a part of it - New York, New York, that is - and he has been, ever since 1957, when he was hired as rehearsal pianist for West Side Story. Two years later, he was the dance arranger on Gypsy, and a couple of years after that he began writing music with a young lyricist called Fred Ebb. Unlike the Missourian Kander, Mr Ebb didn't have to spread the news of his leaving. He was a part of it from day one - born in New York, New York, either in 1928 or 1933, according to which reference book you believe. I knew him from the Eighties onward, and to me he looked young, if only by Broadway standards. He spent his entire life waking up in the city that doesn't sleep, but had a harder job becoming top of the heap. He hung around the theatre; wrote a revue with a guy called Paul Klein, who quit showbiz to go into waterproofing; and was taken under the wing of Phil Springer, composer of Sinatra's "How Little We Know" and "Santa Baby". And then in 1964 he was introduced to John Kander and they wrote a hit song called "My Coloring Book". Four decades later, at the time of Fred's death, their second show Cabaret was virtually a permanent fixture in New York and in London, and the film version of Chicago was an Oscar-winning Best Picture.

This last decade can't have been easy for John Kander, by common consent one of the nicest guys in a business not known for niceness. Ebb's death from a heart attack in 2004, at the peak of Chicago's success on stage and screen, ended the last monogamous writing partnership on Broadway. There used to be a lot of those - George & Ira Gershwin, Rodgers & Hart, Rodgers & Hammerstein - and then there were only Kander & Ebb. "One reason why they've avoided the career slumps that almost everyone else has had is simply that they've stayed together," Alan Jay Lerner once told me. "A composer and lyricist grow together." Lerner had hits like My Fair Lady and flopperoo one-night stands like Dance A Little Closer, the kind of mega-disaster that Kander & Ebb, Broadway's last surviving words-and-music team, almost uniquely managed to steer clear of. "Even when we write lousy, Fred and I always have a good time," Kander said to me a few years ago.

Their last show, starring David Hyde Pierce (from TV's "Frasier"), was, appropriately, Curtains. It was a musical murder mystery, which isn't as surefire a blend of boffo genres as it sounds. There have never really been any mystery musicals, for obvious reasons. "The audience wants to get on with the mystery. So they don't want to stop for songs," Fred Ebb agreed when I pointed this out a couple of years before his death. "That's the challenge - and I love a challenge." By the time it opened, a play about a murderer stalking a Broadway musical had itself lost a few of its creators to the grim reaper, including lyricist Ebb, librettist Peter Stone and orchestrator Michael Gibson. And John Kander found himself facing his first first night since A Family Affair way back in 1964 without his greatest writing partner. Many of their songs are known, but not on this scale:

If I can make it there
I'll make it anywhere
It's up to you

New York, New York!

It's a school of song that's quintessentially American. As Will Friedwald writes:

It exemplifies the anger and the optimism, the ambition and the aggression, the hostility and the energy, the excitement and the excrement that is New York...

"The excitement and the excrement" is a droll way of putting it: Kander & Ebb's valentine to "the city that doesn't sleep" is both a cliché and a triumphant vindication that rises above it. Fred Ebb's words are the last written in conventional American songbook style to become part of the vernacular. I especially loved a column my late colleague at The Independent Miles Kington wrote a few years ago. Even in its denunciation of the buoyant razzle-dazzle optimism of American showbusiness, the headline was a kind of sour tribute to its potency:

If They Can Make It There, Why Can't They Keep It There?

There are lots of New York songs, and at least two others in the preferred US Postal Service city/state formulation. Gerard Kenny's "New York, New York" ("so good they named it twice") post-dates Kander & Ebb, and this one, by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, pre-dates them by three decades:

New York, New York
A helluva town
The Bronx is up
And the Battery's down...

There's no copyright in title, although I think you'd have to be pretty demented to turn in a new song called "White Christmas" or a novel titled Gone With The Wind. Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn wrote a ballad called "Time After Time" in the Forties and so did Cyndi Lauper in the Eighties, which irked Sammy Cahn no end. As a young man, John Kander had been a rehearsal pianist on Bernstein's West Side Story, so, to avoid (or at least mitigate) offence to the man who composed the show on which he got his break, the new "New York, New York" is officially called "Theme from New York, New York". It was an assignment song. In 1977, Martin Scorsese was making a film about the big band era, with his on-screen alter-ego Robert De Niro as a touring musician, a sax player, one of the boys on the bus. The gal was Liza Minnelli, still hot(ish) from Cabaret and a seemingly shrewd choice for playing the band's canary. That made it all but certain that the songs for the film would be by her off-screen mentors Kander & Ebb. It wasn't a musical, but Scorsese needed a handful of numbers to establish the period and relate to the story, and in particular they needed a big title song to be "written" by De Niro's and Minnelli's characters in the course of the plot. The saxophonist is married to the vocalist, and he writes a tune, and several scenes and dramatic vicissitudes later she puts a lyric to it.

So Kander and Ebb went off and wrote a "New York, New York" number, and they played it for Scorsese and his two stars. Fred Ebb was a lethal song demonstrator, in the same class as Sammy Cahn. With Johnny at the piano, Freddie would put his heart and soul and guts into the song, and if he couldn't sell you a new number nobody could. And they sold this one:

New York, New York
New York, New York
New York, New York
New York, New York
They always say it's a nice place to visit
But I wouldn't want to live there
New York
They always say it's a nice place to sightsee
But I wouldn't want to live there
New York
Of course I do like a 'do on Park Avenue
Or to view a gnu at the Central Park Zoo...

They thought it had gone over well.

And then De Niro beckoned to Scorsese. And, as Fred Ebb put it to me, "They stood up and took one of their famous Italian walks. And we could see but not hear De Niro talking."

"And he was also gesturing," said Kander. "Which we knew was not a good sign."

When the Italian walk was over, De Niro and Scorsese came back to the couch and tried to explain it tactfully. Marty said how much they liked "And The World Goes Round" and the other numbers but that this song was the title song and "Bob thinks" it needs to be really strong, and "Bob wonders" if maybe they wouldn't mind trying again, and Bob this and Bob that and Bob the other. "And we were kind of insulted," chuckled Kander, "at an actor telling us how to write a song. But he turned out to be right."

"Even though," added Ebb, "we wrote the new song in a kind of rage."

It began with a vamp, one of those little musical intros that, when they work, really kick-start a song. But nobody vamps like John Kander, the champ of the vamps. "With Cabaret, we were trying to find the piece, to write our way into it," he once said to me. "The first thing we wrote was 'Willkommen' and the very first thing that ever happened was that little vamp." It was the same with Chicago and "All That Jazz". And, trying to write a big New York song that would be big enough for Robert De Niro, Fred Ebb tossed out a possible first line of lyric:

Start spreading the news.

John Kander liked it and out of the "start sprea-ding the" bit drew a vamp - the "dum-dum-da-de-dum", the all-time great killer vamp that's recognized by the world as a kind of five-note abbreviation for the spirit of New York. That's why Kander loves vamps: they're a good way of letting you know whether you're tonally on track. "When you find something you like, it tells you about the direction you want to go in. I don't mean you go through the process in a doped-up haze, but you have to trust your unconscious."

And from that vamp they never looked back. For a song that to its disparagers sounds like just a big up-and-at-'em showtune, it's actually quite unusually structured. Fred Ebb opted for a "Sunny Side Of The Street" rhyme structure – ie, rhyming not in couplets or quatrains but across the phrases:

Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worries on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street

Can't you hear that pitter-pat?
Oh that happy tune is your step
Life can be so sweet
On The Sunny Side Of The Street...

Likewise:

Start spreading the news
I'm leaving today
I want to be a part of it
New York, New York

These vagabond shoes
Are longing to stray
And step around the heart of it
New York, New York...

It was a song that had everything going for it - if only the film hadn't flopped. But it did - and, although "New York, New York" got a Best Song nomination, it lost to "You Light Up My Life", which may be the silliest Oscar verdict in that category since "They Can't Take That Away From Me" was beaten by "Sweet Leilaini" 40 years earlier.

What transformed the song was Sinatra. On our centenary podcast, Vincent Falcone says he has a photograph of the precise moment when he, Frank and the song all got together:

I am sitting at the piano, he is standing behind me, and he handed me the sheet music to 'New York, New York' and he said, 'Play this for me...' He had gone to see the movie with Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, New York, New York. And he had heard the song and he brought me the sheet music and he said, 'Play this for me.' We were in rehearsal at NBC and I played it and we knew right away that the song had to be.

I believe the very first time Frank Sinatra sang "New York, New York" was at the Waldorf-Astoria on October 13th 1978, at a benefit for the Mercy Hospital. The eleven months between that first performance and the eventual recording were spent Sinatrafying the song, until he'd got it just the way he wanted it. As Vincent Falcone recalls:

At one point he said to me 'We will never record a song again until we have done it on stage for four or five months' - because he wanted to have the opportunity to fully develop the idea of the song, until he got it to the point that he wanted it.

New York, New York' started off being in the overture of a concert that we did at Carnegie Hall. Don Costa had written a new overture which was all New York songs and it ended with the introduction into "New York, New York" and in that introduction he would walk on stage and sing "New York" as the opening song in the show. Well, after the third night he said to me "We can't do this." He says, yeah That was a development that he did until we recorded it, and the end result was this dramatic way of singing this song, and everywhere we ever played it people were on their feet. You know, it's quite an achievement.

In 1978 he was playing a blockbuster engagement at Carnegie Hall and asked Don Costa to put together an overture of New York tunes – "Autumn In New York", "Sidewalks Of New York", and so on and so forth, concluding with Kander & Ebb's "New York, New York". And right on the opening pow! of the vamp Frank would enter, wait for the cheers to die down, and, as Will Friedwald put it, "start spreading the news".

The news spread pretty quickly. "Man, this thing is getting big," Frank said to Vincent Falcone after the third night. "We have to take it out of the overture."

"We were getting such a roar out of the audience, he realized that he can't open with that," said Falcone, "so I wrote an ending to the overture, took the chart of 'New York, New York' out of the overture and we moved it down into the show until eventually it became the closing song." When it began its life as a stand-alone number, Frank sometimes paired it with the "other" "New York, New York" (which is, after all, from a Sinatra movie) serving as a kind of verse, sung slowly and expectantly:

New York, New York
A helluva town
The Bronx is up
And the Battery's down
And the people ride in a hole in the groun'
New York, New York!
It's a...
Helluva...
Town!

Wham! On "town" the band would wallop in Kander's famous vamp and the crowd would go wild. The song never looked back, notwithstanding Fred Ebb's misgivings about Sinatra's lyrical evolution in the second chorus. In the Liza Minnelli original, rather than a straightforward reprise of "I want to wake up in a city that doesn't sleep/And find I'm king of the hill, top of the heap", Ebb extended the thought to make it even more dramatic:

I want to wake up in a city that doesn't sleep
To find I'm king of the hill
Head of the list
Cream of the crop
At the top of the heap!

That "crop"/"top" internal rhyme is typical of Ebb's unobtrusive professional craftsmanship. For his own even more showstopping rallentando, Sinatra changed it to:

I want to wake up in a city that doesn't sleep
To find I'm A-number one
Top of the list
King of the hill
A-number one!

"I didn't write 'A-number one'," said Ebb. "I don't even like it. But I like Sinatra singing 'New York, New York', and I love having a song that everyone knows."

It got better. In his last years, Frank would blast the final word of that middle section, and then cripple up and clutch his side and howl "Ow!". Or he'd straighten up and go, "Every time I hit that note, I get a big pain right here."

Liza and her "Uncle Frank" were close pals, but eventually his version of the song consumed hers. On their tour together in the late Eighties with Sammy Davis Jr, the concluding 20-minute medley was strung around a joke about Sam trying to avoid letting Frank and Liza sing "New York, New York" - and then he'd forget himself, launch into "There's A Boat That's Leaving Soon For New York", and bang on the "York" the familiar vamp came blasting in. But it was Frank's version, with Liza in effect sitting in on his cover of her song. In a guest shot on "Arrested Development", Miss Minnelli hears Tobias Funke singing "New York, New York" and remarks dryly that when it comes to that particular song "everybody thinks of Frank Sinatra".

Indeed. The song was taken up as the anthem of the New York Yankees: When they won, they played Frank's version. When they lost, they played Liza's. That's one of the all-time greatest musical jokes. Miss Minnelli, alas, didn't care for it, and insisted that after winning games they played her record. So they said nuts to that, lady, we won't play your version at all. Liza subsequently and very wisely relented. But even that bizarre stand-off captures the swagger and attitude the song celebrates.

It's one for the ages now, and millions and millions of Americans and millions more around the world who are entirely unaware of Fred Ebb or John Kander nevertheless would instantly recognize that killer vamp. Years ago, filming a song with Liza Minnelli in Ebb's apartment for a BBC TV special, I noticed the sheet music propped up on Fred's grand piano - "Five Minutes More", a Jule Styne/Sammy Cahn pop hit for Sinatra in the Forties. "I wouldn't have thought that was your kind of song," I said to Ebb.

"Oh, I love that kind of song," he said. "And I love even more writing that kind of song. Too many guys writing for the theatre are writing for a little Broadway crowd that comes in the first few weeks of a show. I want to write songs for everybody, and I love it when everyone knows every word of them." To the best of my knowledge, he was never in Times Square at midnight on New Year's Eve when the ball drops and they play "Auld Lang Syne" and then Sinatr's "New York, New York" - but he would have liked the idea of that big, crazy crowd of tourists happy to be in the city that doesn't sleep and lustily bellowing along:

I want to be a part of it
New York, New York!

It's one for the ages now, thanks to Sinatra and a song that sounds as if it was built for him. It wasn't, any more than was that first "New York, New York" anthem - the Bernstein, Comden and Green opener from On The Town. But, between the first one on screen and its successor on stage, he has a hammerlock on both. In 1993, I interviewed the Broadway director, George Abbott, then aged 106, and asked him about working on On The Town half a century earlier, and in particular about the Bernstein "New York, New York". "I always thought that was the best New York song," said Mister Abbott. "But I must confess that new one is better. The one the little girl sings."

The "little girl", Liza Minnelli, had been given her big break by Mister Abbott on Flora The Red Menace in the early Sixties. It was Liza's first show, and Kander and Ebb's. But you can forgive Abbott, at 106, at still thinking of a star he'd directed when she was 17 and he was already in his 70s as a "little girl".

"Oh," I said, "you mean, 'start spreading the news'? You think that's better than your 'New York, New York'?"

"Yeah."

"Did you ever tell Leonard Bernstein that?"

"No."

"Probably very wise."

As for Sinatra, the last words he ever sang in public were the final "New York" of "New York, New York" at his 80th birthday all-star celebration in 1995:

If I can make it there
I'll make it anywhere
It's up to you
New York, New York!

~Mark's conversation with longtime Sinatra conductor Vincent Falcone, discussing "New York, New York" and many other songs, can be heard here. Steyn's original 1998 obituary of Frank, "The Voice", can be found in the anthology Mark Steyn From Head To Toe, while you can read the stories behind many other Sinatra songs in Mark Steyn's American Songbook. Personally autographed copies of both books are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore.

Breaking News Alert: Colorado Springs Mass Shooter Surrenders

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

The shooter, described earlier as a white man, surrendered to police at 4:52 p.m., MDT (6:52 p.m., EDT) today. He was alive, and has not otherwise been identified.

Eleven people were wounded at the scene and transported to local hospital, including five policemen, though it was not clear if that number included only victims, or the perp, as well. So far, there have been no known fatalities. No information has been provided to the public as to the shooter’s identity, or possible motive.
 

Gunman Gives Up After Colorado Standoff That Leaves 11 Hurt
By Phil Helsel, Andrew Blankstein and Pete Williams
November 27, 2015
NBC News

Multiple Injuries in Shooting at Planned Parenthood Facility in Colorado

A gunman entered a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Friday, firing from the building and injuring police officers during a five-hour standoff that ended with his surrender.

The gunman walked out of facility just before 5 p.m. local time, and officers took him into custody, officials told NBC News.

A total of 11 people, five of them police officers, were injured in the day of violence and taken to area hospitals, police said. Police said they had no information that anyone died.

"At this point I have as many questions as you do," Colorado Springs Police Chief Peter Carey told reporters before heading to the hospital to visit injured officers.


Emergency personnel transport an officer to an ambulance after reports of a shooting near the Planned Parenthood clinic Friday, Nov, 27, 2015, in Colorado Springs, Colo. Daniel Owen / AP

Police are still clearing the building, now a crime scene, to make sure several unidentified items that the gunman brought with him are not dangerous, police said.

The shooting and standoff unfolded during a regular working day at the facility, with patients waiting for appointments and staff members attending to them, Colorado Springs Police Department Lt. Catherine Buckley said.

Several escaped during the ordeal, thanks in part to police personnel who rammed the side of the building with a truck, officials told NBC News.

The gunshots were first reported near the Planned Parenthood facility on Centennial Boulevard at around 11:38 a.m., police said.

The gunman, who has not been identified, began in the parking lot of Planned Parenthood and then entered the building, a law enforcement official told NBC News.

Police officers who responded were fired upon, and the gunman fired at police at various times during the ensuing standoff, police said.


A police vehicle, carrying a suspect, is lead [sic] away after a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic Friday, Nov. 27, 2015, in Colorado Springs, Colo. A gunman opened fire at the clinic on Friday, authorities said, wounding multiple people. David Zalubowski / AP

At one point, the gunman, armed with an AK-47-style weapon, was surrounded in the lobby, according to a law enforcement source with direct knowledge of the situation.

Authorities tapped into the building's video surveillance system, and were able to monitor the gunman's movements, officials said.

Dozens of people at nearby businesses were ordered to lock the doors and shelter in place as police responded to the scene. After the standoff ended, authorities began releasing them, Buckley said.

Joan Motolinia said his sister was in the clinic when gunshots were heard. "She called me and she was screaming there was a shooting," he said. "She couldn't say too much because she was afraid."

"She was telling me she was hiding under a table," Motolinia said. He said he heard more shots over the phone, and his sister hung up.

[“Hiding” under a table, while screaming her head off. Makes perfect sense to me.]

Caren Kesterson was working at a nearby Supercuts hair salon when two police cars sped past.

"We got up and we looked outside, and it was like almost immediately we heard gunshots — easily over 20," Kesterson told MSNBC by telephone.

The FBI and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives were among several law enforcement agencies who responded.

A White House official said President Barack Obama has been notified about the situation.

Vicki Cowart, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains, said Friday that "we don't yet know if Planned Parenthood was in fact the target of this attack."

But she vowed in a statement: "We will never back away from providing care in a safe, supportive environment that millions of people rely on and trust."

Hate Crime in St. Paul? Black Man, 55, Previously Convicted of Attempted Murder and Aggravated Kidnapping (and Arrested for Murdering an Additional Victim), Arrested for Kidnapping and Repeatedly Raping a Man, 19

 











Cook County Jail mug shots of Wilbert Glover, presumably from 1985. All mugshots are in the public domain. Slapping a copyright symbol on a mug shot cannot change that.
 

By Nicholas Stix

Note that Wilbert Glover benefited from massive criminal justice affirmative action. He should have gotten life without parole for the murder charge alone. He got 40 years. He should have gotten life for the kidnapping charge alone. He got six years. And he should have gotten 20-to-life for attempted murder alone. He got six years.

But he appears to have murdered someone he kidnapped, which is a federal death penalty offense (kidnapping is federal), aside from his additional attempted murder.

So, instead of getting the needle, he did a lousy 21 years in medium security, “Dixon State University.”

“Illinois Department of Corrections records show Glover was convicted in the 1980s of kidnapping and attempted murder.”

I guess he got a freebie for the murder.

If you kidnap someone, and he somehow dies during or immediately after the crime (e.g., from a heart attack, immediately after being released), that’s capital murder, regardless of who pulled the trigger. It’s just like being the getaway driver on a bank heist, where your partners murder someone inside the bank. In for a dime, in for a dollar. However, over the past 50 years or so, jurors who are fans of black cut-throats have increasingly engaged in various degrees of jury nullification.
For instance, during the early 1970s, black supremacist cut-throat Robert “Sonny” Carson led his gang in a kidnapping of two men, murdering one and shooting and leaving for dead the second vic. In a travesty of justice, the Brooklyn jury convicted Carson of kidnapping, but not of murder, and sentenced him to virtually no time.

Now, the $64 question is, What race is the 19-year-old vic? Was this possibly a hate crime by a man who may have committed the same hate crime countless times inside? Ultra-violent black homosexuals are obsessed with raping whites--men and women alike.

It makes you also wonder what race Glover's vics were 30 years ago.
 

Mugshots.com

Wilbert Glover was booked in Cook County, IL.
The following Official Record of Wilbert Glover is being redistributed by Mugshots.com and is protected by constitutional, publishing, and other legal rights. This Official Record was collected from a Law Enforcement agency on 3/01/2011. Last updated on 10/11/2013.

Mugshots.com ID: 240343
DOC Number: N73280
Parent Institution: DIXON CORRECTIONAL CENTER
Inmate Status: PAROLE
Location: PAROLE DISTRICT 1
Birth date: 4/13/1960
Weight: 164 lb (74 kg)
Hair Color: Black
Gender: Male
Height: 5′ 10″ (1.78 m)
Race: Black
Eye Color: Brown
Admission Date: 9/04/1987
Parole Date: 9/26/2008
Projected Discharge Date: 9/28/2011
Scars / Marks / Tattoos: N/A
Sentence Information:
Field Name Field Value

MITTIMUS 86CR5308
CLASS M
COUNT 1
OFFENSE MURDER/INTENT TO KILL/INJURE
CUSTODY DATE 12/28/1985
SENTENCE 40 Years 0 Months 0 Days
COUNTY COOK
SENTENCE DISCHARGED? NO

MITTIMUS 86CR5475
CLASS X
COUNT 1
OFFENSE ATTEMPT MURDER/INTENT TO KILL/INJURE
CUSTODY DATE 12/28/1985
SENTENCE 6 Years 0 Months 0 Days
COUNTY COOK
SENTENCE DISCHARGED? NO

MITTIMUS 84C13843
CLASS 1
COUNT 1
OFFENSE AGGR KIDNAPPING-NO RANSOM
CUSTODY DATE 12/28/1985
SENTENCE 6 Years 0 Months 0 Days
COUNTY COOK
SENTENCE DISCHARGED? NO

 
Police say man abducted, assaulted teen; kept him shackled
By Associated Press
November 26, 2015, 7:48 PM
WGN-TV

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Authorities say a 55-year-old man kidnapped a 19-year-old man from a Minneapolis street, took him to his St. Paul home, and kept him chained up while repeatedly sexually assaulting him over four days.

The victim escaped Tuesday and went to a neighbor’s for help. And on Wednesday, authorities charged Wilbert Glover with kidnapping and criminal sexual conduct.

Glover is being held on $1 million bail and is scheduled to make his first court appearance Monday. Online court records don’t list an attorney for him. The criminal complaint says Glover injured himself in a holding cell after banging his head on a door frame.

Illinois Department of Corrections records show Glover was convicted in the 1980s of kidnapping and attempted murder. He was released from prison in 2008.

The Myth that Syrian “Refugees” Can be Vetted is Part of the Myth that Any Third-World “Refugees” Can be Vetted (Ann Coulter)

 

It's a pack of lies, but it's official White House lies
 

[Read my review of Ann Coulter’s Adios, America! here.]
 

Excerpted by Nicholas Stix

As I have previously written about the Central Americans and Mexicans “Obama” has sought to illegally and unconstitutionally amnesty, we don’t even know who these people are. They routinely use fake names, and often have whole libraries of aliases.
 

 

Ann Coulter: Importing Terrorism and Other American Values
November 25, 2015
VDARE

Americans keep being hectored to take “refugees” from terrorist-producing countries because to do otherwise would be “a betrayal of our values,” as President Obama said on Monday.

The rise of Donald Trump reminds us of the popularity of another, long-forgotten American value: protecting Americans.

Contrary to Obama’s laughable reference to “the universal values” that “all of humanity” share, most of the world does not share our values, at all. They barely seem to share our DNA. As indignantly explained by the lawyer representing two Iraqis accused of child rape in Nebraska, America’s views about women and children “put us in the minority position in the world.”

Pederasty, child brides, honor killings, clitorectomies, stonings, wife beatings—when will America grow up and join the 21st century? (A lot sooner, if Marco Rubio has his way!)

[Read the whole thing at VDARE.]

“Liberalism,” Islam, and Slavery Today (Poster)



Thursday, November 26, 2015

Frank Sinatra, Cy Coleman, Count Basie and Quincy Jones: The Best is Yet to Come (Live!)

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
 

Album Title: Frank Sinatra: The Reprise Collection, Disc 2
Prime Artist: Frank Sinatra
Arranger: Quincy Jones
Lyrics by: Carolyn Leigh
Music by: Cy Coleman
Orchestra: Count Basie (William)

Lyrics:

Out of the tree of life I just picked me a plum,
You came along and everything's startin' to hum,
Still, it's a real good bet, the best is yet to come.

The best is yet to come and
Babe, won't that be fine?
You think you've seen the sun,
But you ain't seen it shine.

Wait till the warm-up's underway,
Wait till our lips have met,
And wait till you see that sunshine day,
You ain't seen nothin' yet.

The best is yet to come,
And babe, won't it be fine?
The best is yet to come,
Come the day you're mine.

Come the day you're mine,
I'm gonna teach you to fly,
We've only tasted the wine,
We're gonna drain the cup dry.

Wait till your charms are right,
For these arms to surround,
You think you've flown before,
But baby, you ain't left the ground.

Wait till you're locked in my embrace,
Wait till I draw you near,
Wait till you see that sunshine place,
Ain't nothin' like it here.

The best is yet to come,
And babe, won't it be fine?
The best is yet to come,
Come the day you're mine.

Come the day you're mine,
And you're gonna be mine.

Transcribed by Ron Hontz

http://www.thepeaches.com/music/ 
 


 

Posted on May 20, 2013 by The Sinatrafans.

Frank Sinatra Sings Oscar-Winning “Three Coins in the Fountain” (with Lyrics)

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

Three Coins in the Fountain
Music by Jule Styne
Words by Sammy Cahn
 


 


 

Posted by Sinatra Fan on November 25, 2011.

Oblahblah, Syrian Refugees, and Sanctuary Cities

Forwarded by Reader-Researcher RC

A great comment below in response to Oblahblah Administration who says States will be breaking the law if they do not accept Syrian refugees. In fact, the Oblahblah administration is already breaking the law by allowing Sanctuary cities to harbor illegal aliens - as noted in the federal law on the books below.


Commenter 1 hour ago

"The letter says states that do not comply with the requirement would be breaking the law" ~ And this is different from sanctuary cities HOW?? i.e.

1907. Title 8, U.S.C. 1324(a) Offenses ~ “Harboring -- Subsection 1324(a)(1)(A)(iii) makes it an offense for any person who -- knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation.”

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Mark Steyn on “It Had to be You” (Steyn on Sinatra)

 
 


Billy Crystal on New Year's Eve: He wandered around and finally found the somebody who...
 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
 

It Had to be You
Sinatra Song of the Century #5
By Isham Jones and Gus Kahn
Steyn's Song of the Week Extra
January 23, 2015
Steyn Online

A decade after Frank Sinatra recorded "It Had To Be You", it turned up in the blockbuster romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally. There's a lot of songs in the film - Ella and Louis, Allman Brothers, Ray Charles... It was 1989, and we were in the early stages of what I think of as the age of jukebox scoring, in which directors fill up the movie with bits of their favorite pop songs. But Rob Reiner uses the whole Sinatra track - everything from intro to final fade:

Billy May's orchestral opening finds Harry (Billy Crystal) walking along the street, alone on New Year's Eve. As the vocal starts, Harry stops at a shop window. The verse is a series of questions ("Why must I do just as you say?") that Harry, contemplating his reflection in the glass, is asking of himself. By the time Frank is singing about "that something lovers call fate" telling him "I had to wait", Harry is walking on, discarding his ice-cream cone in a trash can, and turning his head on the first line of the chorus:

It Had To Be You

It Had To Be You...

And we're in flashback: Harry and Sally meeting all those years earlier at college, sitting on a plane, strolling Central Park, faking orgasm in the diner - the whole plot replayed to Sinatra's vocal. By the instrumental, they're dancing cheek to cheek. It's a wisecracky kind of a film, but not here: between Billy May's intro and outro, Harry has to understand that he really does love Sally and has to be with her. So the song bears a major dramatic burden - which is why Reiner went with Sinatra and "It Had To Be You".

The ballad belongs to a select group of über-standards - "The Way You Look Tonight", "I'll Be Seeing You", the handful of songs that will still be sung when everything else has fallen away. Johnny Mercer regarded "It Had To Be You" as the greatest popular song ever written, and I've heard several other songwriters say the same thing over the years. So, if it's that good, how come it sat around for 55 years before Sinatra sang it? He first recorded "I'll Be Seeing You" in 1940 and "The Way You Look Tonight" in 1943, but he was late getting to "It Had To Be You". Doris Day beat him to it, and Andy Williams, Barbra Streisand, Harry Nilsson, Petula Clark, Diane Keaton in the film Annie Hall... In the normal course of events, when John Travolta records a 50-year-old standard, he does it in the shadow of a landmark Sinatra recording. But in this case Travolta got there two years before Frank.

Who wrote "It Had To Be You"? Cole Porter? The Gershwins? No, it was Isham Jones and Gus Kahn. Who? Don't laugh: By some rankings, Gus Kahn is second only to Irving Berlin in the number of hit songs he wrote, including our very first two Songs of the Week, "San Francisco" (Number One) and "Dream A Little Dream Of Me" (Number Two). Frank sang a lot of Gus Kahn lyrics. Kahn has two tracks on the defining Sinatra LP of the Fifties, Songs For Swingin' Lovers - "Makin' Whoopee" and "Swingin' Down The Lane", which is the nearest thing to a title song.

He had a remarkable facility for being romantic and true and affecting in simple monosyllables. Maybe he'd have been more polysyllabic if he'd been a natural-born American. But Gustav Kahn was born in Koblenz, Germany, in 1886, and didn't sail for the United States until he was four years old. "My father," Donald Kahn told me, "brought with him a drum, which he drove my grandfather crazy with during the rather lengthy voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. When they got to Ellis Island, my grandfather apparently had had enough of the drum and threw it right in the water. I have had the quaint theory that my father's love of the drum and the love of the beat is part of what made him turn to music and to lyric-writing and writing songs."

Kahn wrote with many composers, from George Gershwin (on "Liza") to Walter Donaldson (on "My Baby Just Cares For Me"). But for a little over twelve months he had an extraordinarily productive partnership with Isham Jones. A Chicago bandleader with a residency at the Hotel Sherman's College Inn ballroom, Jones signed to Brunswick Records in 1920 and was offered a choice between a fixed salary, which many musicians and singers were on in those days, or royalties. He opted for the latter, and by 1923 had made 800 grand. In 1922, in his home town of Saginaw, Michigan, the company cut him in as co-owner of "the Isham Jones Brunswick Shop", selling only Brunswick products.

He'd always composed, on and off. In 1917 he wrote one of the first jazz songs, "That's Jaz!", back before anyone had agreed on the spelling of the word. But nothing really clicked until he hooked up with Gus Kahn. Their first hit, in 1922, was "On The Alamo", a lovely tune built on an opening phrase that's reprised with ever shifting harmony and is utterly beguiling. But the team really hit their stride a year or so later with a quartet of songs that seemingly came out nowhere - "Swingin' Down The Lane", "I'll See You In My Dreams", "The One I Love (Belongs To Somebody Else)" and "It Had To Be You". As Kahn's son Donald told me:

I think when you get in a streak - and my dad and Isham were in a streak, where things are going well and the songs are making it - you just want to ride it out. It's kind of like a lucky streak in Vegas. My dad and Isham had just finished 'The One I Love (Belongs To Somebody Else)', and the band was playing it and my mother and father were dancing to that song. While they were dancing to that song, my father was working on the lyric of another song – 'Swingin' Down The Lane'. At any rate, as they were dancing and the band was playing the one song, my father was saying to my mother, 'What do you think of this lyric for Isham's new tune?' I would say that this is an incredible kind of concentration. It's almost impossible to do: try it some time when you're dancing with your best girl.

A third of a century after Gus Kahn breathed that lyric into his wife Grace's ear on the dance floor of the Hotel Sherman, Sinatra recorded "Swingin' Down The Lane" in a killer Nelson Riddle arrangement:

Ev'rybody's hand in hand

Swingin' Down The Lane

Ev'rybody's feeling grand

Swingin' Down The Lane

That's the time I miss the bliss

That we might have known

Nights like this

When I'm all alone...

It's melodically charming, and the absence of any fill or pick-up notes in that space between "might have known" and "nights like this" is very surefooted on Jones and Kahn's part. Still, it was an old-fashioned song by 1956 that sounds as if it belongs to a pre-automobile Lovers' Lane. Yet Sinatra's reading is utterly sincere, and Riddle scored it in what he called "the tempo of the heartbeat", and with such attention to detail, from the stellar trumpets to the celesta:

When the moon is on the rise

Baby, I'm so blue

Watching lovers making eyes

Like we used to do

When the moon is on the wane

Still I'm waiting all in vain

Should be Swingin' Down The Lane

With you...

I'm not even sure "swingin' down the lane" is a thing, or ever was. But by the time it's over Sinatra and Riddle have made it a song for all time.

I said above that that quartet of terrific songs seemingly came out of nowhere. In fact, three-quarters of them came out of a 30th birthday present. On January 31st 1924 Isham Jones hit the big three-oh, and his missus Marguerita decided to give him a baby grand. He was a saxophonist and bassist, and from a long line of fiddlers, but the piano delighted him. He sat down and (according to who's telling the story) either within an hour or the evening he had composed four melodies - "Spain", "I'll See You In My Dreams", "The One I Love (Belongs To Somebody Else)" and "It Had To Be You". The tale sounds plausible to me, but we shouldn't get hung up on whether it took an hour or all night: That group of compositions would be impressive if all were copyrighted within the same year, which they were. Sinatra eschewed "Spain", but he sang the remaining three - "I'll See You In My Dreams" on the radio with Tommy Dorsey in 1940, "The One I Love" every which way for almost half-a-century, and finally in 1979, saving the best till last:

It Had To Be You

It Had To Be You

I wandered around

And finally found

The somebody who...

The musicologist Philip Furia calls that "who" - which has to wait for the song's next section to get its verb and its rhyme ("could make me be true") - the first example in the American Songbook of what he calls "elasticated syntax", where the lyricist stretches the syntax across the boundaries of the composer's eight-bar compartments. If so, it was made for Sinatra's Dorsey-trombone trick of holding a note and connecting it up to the next phrase in order to tell the story better. If you've ever heard a singer take a big deep breath after "somebody who" and leave a gap you could drive a truck through before "could make me be true", you'll know they're not listening to what they're singing.

"It Had To Be You" was part of Sinatra's three-album Trilogy set. Part One was The Past - old songs scored by Billy May in big-band style; Part Two was The Present - contemporary-ish songs scored by Don Costa in middle-of-the-road/soft rock style; and Part Three was Reflections On The Future In Three Tenses, a sort of post-nuclear conceptual suite composed by Gordon Jenkins. The Future LP got panned, the Present got so-so notices, but everyone loved the Past. Sinatra recorded "It Had to Be You" and the other Billy May arrangements in July, but a couple of months later he called May and said his voice was in better shape and he'd like to do the tracks again. May told me he made a lot of changes: raising the key here, eliminating a verse there, re-orchestrating much of the material. But "It Had To Be You" was one of only two tracks retained from the July sessions. Sometimes I wish they'd overhauled that, too. Sinatra sings the verse, which I always feel is musically very ordinary and lyrically superfluous:

Why do I do just as you say?

Why must I just give you your way?

Why do I sigh?

Why don't I try

To forget?

It must have been that something lovers call fate

Kept me saying I had to wait

I saw them all

Just couldn't fall

Till we met...

It Had To Be You...

Still, at least Sinatra sings the verse, as opposed to shouting it, as Tony Bennett does on his somewhat perplexing reading. Nevertheless, "It Had To Be You" is all about the chorus. The words are commonplace - all about "the somebody who...

Could make me be true

Could make me be blue

And even be glad

Just to be sad

Thinking of you...

But they're deepened and warmed by the notes they sit on, which seem in some strange way to be written as a tune you already know. The music for the title phrase is unusual for a Twenties song; it's like an internal thought, a monologue. And there are all kinds of other unobtrusive, distinctive features, like the octave drop that gets you from the third section to the final stretch:

Some others I've seen

Might never be mean

Might never be cross

Or, try to be boss

But, they wouldn't
do

For nobody else gave me a thrill...

Billy May was principally Sinatra's partner-in-swing - "Come Fly With Me", "Come Dance With Me" - but he was a sensitive arranger of ballads, too, as you can tell from Frank's "Moonlight In Vermont". His ballads on Trilogy are lush, and on "It Had To Be You" I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer something more intimate, like Dinah Shore's recording with André Previn. But then you hear that ethereal orchestral introduction of Billy's, and you realize he's very cleverly writing it to convey the sense of memory, as if Sinatra has a history with this song he's never sung before.

After composing "Swingin' Down The Lane", "I'll See You In My Dreams", "The One I Love (Belongs To Somebody Else)" and "It Had To Be You" in nothing flat, Isham Jones lived another 32 years without writing a single other song of note - although Alec Wilder puts in a good word for "The Wooden Soldier And The China Doll" (all together now!). But that 1924 streak is more than enough. There is a line in the final eight bars that sums up the difference men like Isham Jones and Gus Kahn made:

For nobody else gave me a thrill

With all your faults I love you still...

We don't recognize the allusion now, but in 1924 many people did. In 1888, Monroe H Rosenfeld wrote the words and music for a lugubrious ballad called "With All Her Faults I Love Her Still":

Though other hearts have won her love

I bear for her no dreams of ill

Her face to me still dear shall be

With all her faults, I love, I love her still!

It's not just the stodgy prosody and inverted word order. In this case the guy means it about "all her faults", and he's condescending to them. Jones and Kahn don't borrow the words so much as transform them, so that they're an expression of that helpless surrender to love. That's why they're right for Billy Crystal at the end of a film in which he's spent much of the time niggling about Meg Ryan taking an hour to order a salad and then insisting the waiter bring the dressing on the side. I have no idea why a hoary old 19th century parlor ballad written two years before Gustav Kahn's family left Koblenz should suddenly pop into the head of a German immigrant 38 years later, but in the gulf between that line's two deployments is the invention of the eternal, enduring American popular song. Sinatra cut it mighty fine, but I'm glad he got to it:

It Had To Be You

Wonderful you

It Had To Be You.

~Mark's original 1998 obituary of Sinatra, "The Voice", appears in the anthology Mark Steyn From Head To Toe. You can read about composer Jule Styne and the creation of some classic Sinatra songs in Mark Steyn's American Songbook. Personally autographed copies of both books are exclusively available from the Steyn store.